Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Performance Will Be Adequate

This is for the readers that worked with me at our startup. When we had a developers conference for the beta release of 1.0 our server team leader was presenting and was asked what the performance of the server would be like. His response was "adequate". Not the terminology marketing would have preferred.

I remember a Dilbert strip where he was brought on a call to customer and the lesson was never let an engineer talk directly to a customer because they don't lie. I think at the end he bursts out saying "it's a lie and we had to reclassify all the bugs as features just before release", but I can't find the strip.

Stephen Colbert had Vice Chairman of General Motors Bob Lutz on Wed night. He was talking about the new GM Volt, a new electric car that the company is betting heavily on.

At about 4:20 into this video Colbert asks "Let's talk 0-60 here. Will that thing jump off the line?" Lutz replies "Adequately" and Colbert and the audience laughs. The rest is really funny too, watch the whole thing.

2 comments:

I was warned not to try to counter his humor with offerings of my own: “He’ll inevitably win. You should just smile, and play it straight.”

I resolved to obey, but lost it as the “interview” began: if one has any sense of humor at all, it’s just impossible not to have it triggered when engaged by Colbert’s brilliant but outrageous persona. It turns out, unfortunately, that “outrageous” is the main bandwidth of my humor, so I found my responses coming reasonably fast and automatically. Although if you see the interview, you’ll notice some pauses on my part. Those pauses were not because I didn’t know what to say; they were time needed to index through and discard the truly dangerous answers!